Post by Ramzo Wily on Jul 3, 2018 10:05:52 GMT -6
So I've given myself a full weekend to think about how I felt about the game, and just wanted to share my overall experience. I'm going to start with the bad, because I want to emphasize that there is way less bad then good, and these are just the things that I feel if they were fixed, would make the game damn near perfect. Here we go:
The BAD:
- The voice acting. I hate saying this, because out of any complaint I could have, this seems the most directly insulting. I promise I don't mean this as an insult, but the voice acting is absolutely HORRENDOUS. I say this as a person who has literally NEVER complained about voice acting in anything. I say this as a person who thinks the voice acting in MN9 is perfectly reasonable. Literally the only time I've ever said a bad thing about voice acting is after having completed something and then had someone TELL me the voice acting was bad, and then explain in great detail why, and then I go back through the thing and listen to it again with an ear for what they were telling me and then finally, somewhat begrudgingly, maybe say "Yeah, I guess it might kinda be bad." But in this game, the voice acting felt jarring at best, and absolutely needle-to-the-ear-drums pain at the worst. That little girl, what was her name? Ann or something? She caused me physical pain to hear her talk. I kinda feel like the voice acting maybe needs to be removed from the game entirely, but failing that at least I can play with the voice acting turned off, right?
- The visuals, in places, are kinda... bad. I mean, I love the overall look of the game. I think a lot of the visuals are great. But a lot of it looks kind of... unpolished and unfinished, and I'm hoping that's the case and the game's visuals will continue to improve for the final version. There's only two spots I think really need some work, though. One is the village. It is super ugly. Mostly, it's just the color pallet. I get that there's like a blood red sky and that's maybe suppose to make everything look a little... redder? to reflect that, but... it's just ugly. Especially the rooftops of the buildings. All this should require is some reworking of the colors used, and it should be fine. The other part is that some bits of the game looks very much like bad mid 90s CGI. This is most obvious when it does that random zoom through the village up to the castle to the "Bloodstained" splash title screen. It looks like it was taking from some other video game from the mid 90s when they still thought bad CGI like that was supa cool. Maybe this was done intentionally to look nostalgic.... but if so... don't. There's nothing nostalgic about bad CGI. It's just bad. Maybe it just looked this way cuz it's unfinished. That would be fine. As long as the visuals keep improving, there shouldn't be an issue.
- To be honest, the game is... a little boring. At first. Not the gameplay, which is great. It's the dialogue. There's so, so much of it. It just feels like they go on and on and on and on about every little thing. Everything is just way too over-explained. Even the opening text scroll. Two or three SHORT paragraphs at most to explain the background. We don't need a novella just to go into the game where we then get a long dialogue scene before we even get to control a character - which then is just to open a chest before going back into another long dialogue scene. This is made all the worse by the terrible and awkward voice acting, which really also makes the voice acting seem worse than it probably actually is. It's sort of an endlessly self destructive circle. Short and concise. Don't overdo it. This problem is even practically pointed out at one point, unintentionally, by the characters. After you save Ana or Anna or whatever, Dominique and Miriam and Johannes proceed to have a long conversation before the little girl is like, "Oh, by the way, I'm fine," to which Miriam basically replies, "Oh, sorry, the grownups were busy having a long and pointless conversation instead of worrying about the child who was just attacked by a demon from hell." I'm sure there's nothing to worry about. Although, thinking about it now, considering Anne or whatever's voice acting, I kinda wish there was an option to just let the kid die so I didn't have to hear her talk. And yes, I realize the irony of complaining about too much talking when I won't shut up myself.
So that does it for the bad. Now the good is... well, basically everything else. I love the way this game feels, looks, sounds, and plays in just about every other aspect from what I mentioned above. It seems like it's exactly the game I was hoping for: a game that's a bit more like Aria/Dawn than it is Symphony, while also feeling like a completely new game in the series. I again want to emphasize that even if nothing from the "bad" that I mentioned above changes - so long as I can turn the voice volume down to zero - I have no doubt that I will absolutely love the final product as much as I hoped I would when I backed this baby on day 1.
The BAD:
- The voice acting. I hate saying this, because out of any complaint I could have, this seems the most directly insulting. I promise I don't mean this as an insult, but the voice acting is absolutely HORRENDOUS. I say this as a person who has literally NEVER complained about voice acting in anything. I say this as a person who thinks the voice acting in MN9 is perfectly reasonable. Literally the only time I've ever said a bad thing about voice acting is after having completed something and then had someone TELL me the voice acting was bad, and then explain in great detail why, and then I go back through the thing and listen to it again with an ear for what they were telling me and then finally, somewhat begrudgingly, maybe say "Yeah, I guess it might kinda be bad." But in this game, the voice acting felt jarring at best, and absolutely needle-to-the-ear-drums pain at the worst. That little girl, what was her name? Ann or something? She caused me physical pain to hear her talk. I kinda feel like the voice acting maybe needs to be removed from the game entirely, but failing that at least I can play with the voice acting turned off, right?
- The visuals, in places, are kinda... bad. I mean, I love the overall look of the game. I think a lot of the visuals are great. But a lot of it looks kind of... unpolished and unfinished, and I'm hoping that's the case and the game's visuals will continue to improve for the final version. There's only two spots I think really need some work, though. One is the village. It is super ugly. Mostly, it's just the color pallet. I get that there's like a blood red sky and that's maybe suppose to make everything look a little... redder? to reflect that, but... it's just ugly. Especially the rooftops of the buildings. All this should require is some reworking of the colors used, and it should be fine. The other part is that some bits of the game looks very much like bad mid 90s CGI. This is most obvious when it does that random zoom through the village up to the castle to the "Bloodstained" splash title screen. It looks like it was taking from some other video game from the mid 90s when they still thought bad CGI like that was supa cool. Maybe this was done intentionally to look nostalgic.... but if so... don't. There's nothing nostalgic about bad CGI. It's just bad. Maybe it just looked this way cuz it's unfinished. That would be fine. As long as the visuals keep improving, there shouldn't be an issue.
- To be honest, the game is... a little boring. At first. Not the gameplay, which is great. It's the dialogue. There's so, so much of it. It just feels like they go on and on and on and on about every little thing. Everything is just way too over-explained. Even the opening text scroll. Two or three SHORT paragraphs at most to explain the background. We don't need a novella just to go into the game where we then get a long dialogue scene before we even get to control a character - which then is just to open a chest before going back into another long dialogue scene. This is made all the worse by the terrible and awkward voice acting, which really also makes the voice acting seem worse than it probably actually is. It's sort of an endlessly self destructive circle. Short and concise. Don't overdo it. This problem is even practically pointed out at one point, unintentionally, by the characters. After you save Ana or Anna or whatever, Dominique and Miriam and Johannes proceed to have a long conversation before the little girl is like, "Oh, by the way, I'm fine," to which Miriam basically replies, "Oh, sorry, the grownups were busy having a long and pointless conversation instead of worrying about the child who was just attacked by a demon from hell." I'm sure there's nothing to worry about. Although, thinking about it now, considering Anne or whatever's voice acting, I kinda wish there was an option to just let the kid die so I didn't have to hear her talk. And yes, I realize the irony of complaining about too much talking when I won't shut up myself.
So that does it for the bad. Now the good is... well, basically everything else. I love the way this game feels, looks, sounds, and plays in just about every other aspect from what I mentioned above. It seems like it's exactly the game I was hoping for: a game that's a bit more like Aria/Dawn than it is Symphony, while also feeling like a completely new game in the series. I again want to emphasize that even if nothing from the "bad" that I mentioned above changes - so long as I can turn the voice volume down to zero - I have no doubt that I will absolutely love the final product as much as I hoped I would when I backed this baby on day 1.
yey